Many medical procedures intend to achieve a result in the care of a patient by determining, measuring or diagnosing a patient condition or parameter. Other common kinds of procedures may be therapeutic, with an intention of treating, curing or restoring function or structure to a patient.
An example therapeutic procedure includes acupuncture, which attempts to control flow of toxins/blood in the body of a patient. Prior to or during treatment, it may be helpful for a medical practitioner to image the body to study and identify regions that require treatment (e.g., based on low blood flow). However, obtaining real-time feedback regarding effect of the treatment can be difficult.
Many types of medical sensors are available for measuring various health parameters, such as pulse or glucose levels, where a measurement is a scalar value or for measuring distribution of quantities, such as temperature distribution or blood density levels, where a measurement is a scalar field. These measurements are typically stored and analyzed on a desktop computer, and thus, real-time feedback to a medical practitioner may not be available.
Further, visualizing the measurements received from the sensors in real-time can aid the medical practitioner. Similarly, in other fields, such as materials sciences, practitioners could find it to be useful to visualize outputs of sensors that measure physical occurrences in real-time to assist the practitioners in their fields.